Modern Factory Research Articles

Tech Mirages, the Worship of Innovation, the Open Office and Creative Destruction: The End of Value

Claims that an open office plan is the most efficient and can promote the greatest amount of innovation and creativity over all other designs of workspaces have become common place. An examination of the basis of this claim finds little objective or empirical evidence to support it. Most innovations and inventions over the past 2000 years have been reported by single individuals working alone. The modern laboratory is often seen as the evolution of the medieval artist/alchemist’s workshop as is the modern factory. The link here is spurious as the modernity of the workplace replaces the innovator’s presence with the supervisor or overseer. It is the new Panopticon.

19. YÜZYIL ENDÜSTRİ MİRASI ÖRNEĞİ OLARAK TİRİLYE'DE BİR ZEYTİNYAĞI FABRİKASI

Tirilye is a coastal town located in the west of Mudanya, Bursa and its economy is based on olive cultivation. Tirilye, which is worldwide known for its olive and olive oil production, was also an important settlement with sericulture, fishery industry and wine production until recently. Olive production still maintains its importance. The olive oil workshops where the olive oil is produced by traditional techniques and early modern olive oil factories, the primary examples of industrialization have become idle due to their technological backwardness. Since the studies on the conservation of olive industrial heritage are rare, the traditional factories are changing, being demolished and finally disappearing with the machinery inside rapidly. The aim of this paper is to document the industrial heritage olive oil factory, which has been built by Greeks in the second half of 19 th century in Tirilye and remained out of function for nearly 15 years. In this respect, the architectural characteristics, history, construction techniques, materials and measured drawings of the building are investigated in this paper.

Emptying the Oceans: A Summary of Industrial Whaling Catches in the 20th Century

Late 19th century technological advances for capturing whales, when combined with the expansion of processing capabilities in the early 20th century, created an industry that could catch and quickly render virtually any whale in any ocean. Here, using the current International Whaling Commission (IWC) database and other sources, we provide the fi rst accounting of the total global catch by industrial whaling operations in the 20th century. In sum, we estimate that nearly 2.9 million large whales were killed and processed during the period 1900–99. Of this total, 276,442 were killed in the North Atlantic, 563,696 in the North Pacifi c, and 2,053,956 in the Southern Hemisphere. The years 1925–39 in the Southern Hemisphere and 1946–75 in both hemispheres saw the highest totals of whales killed. For the entire 20th century, the largest catches were of fi n, Balaenoptera physalus, and sperm whales, Physeter macrocephalus, with 874,068 and 761,523 taken, respectively; these comprised more than half the total of all large whales taken. As noted in other publications, when one species began to decline, another was sought and hunted to take its place. In addition to reported catches, it is now known that the USSR conducted illegal whaling for more than 30 years. The true Soviet catch totals for the Southern Hemisphere were corrected some years ago, and a more recent assessment of the actual number of whales killed by Soviet factory fl eet ships in the North Pacifi c between 1948 and 1979 has provided us with more accurate numbers with which to calculate the overall global catch. The estimate for the total global catch by the USSR is 534,204 whales, of which 178,811 were not reported to the IWC. Introduction In the 1860’s, the Norwegian whaler and sealer Svend Foyn introduced the steam-powered whale catcher and the exploding harpoon gun to the whaling industry (Tonnessen and Johnsen, 1982). In the 1870’s, he improved upon shore-based factory processing to a level that came to be considered a standard for the industry (Tonnessen and Johnsen, 1982). By the time the 20th century began, the era of modern whaling—at least in the Northern Hemisphere—was well under way. Sixteen shore whaling stations had been established in Norway by 1883 (Risting, 1922; Dickinson and Sanger, 2005), and others were in operation in Newfoundland, Greenland, Russia, and Japan. In 1903, another Norwegian, Christen Christensen, introduced the fi rst factory ship, the wooden steamship Telegraf, into the waters off Spitsbergen (Tonnessen and Johnsen, 1982). Their primary targets were blue, Balaenoptera musculus; fi n, B. physalus; and humpback whales, Megaptera novaeangliae. However, industrial whaling south of the equator did not begin to resemble operations in the north until 5 years into the 20th century. Between 1900 and 1903, the only whales processed industrially were humpbacks caught via net and brought to a shore factory in Whangamumu Bay in New Zealand, a factory that had been established in 1890. The average catch was 8 whales per year during the 20-year operation of this factory (Lillie, 1915; Allison, 2012). The fi rst shore factory in the Southern Ocean was established in Grytviken (Cauldron Bay) on South Georgia Island by the Norwegian Carl Anton Larsen, from the Compania Argentina de Pesca, in late 1904 (Tonnessen and Johnsen, 1982). In 1903, one humpback whale was killed by modern methods by Adolf Andresen in the Straits of Magellan, but his processing station was not established until 1905 (Tonnessen and Johnsen, 1982). Thus, between 1900 and 1908, more whales were captured by industrial whaling methods in the Northern Hemisphere. By 1909, however, whaling south of the equator had surpassed that in the north. This trend continued until 1993, when the catch of whaling operations became comparable in the two hemispheres and were focused largely on minke whales, Balae“Some of the larger factory vessels with their capacity of over 2,500 barrels of oil per day capture more in two days than the original fl oating factories of 1904 were able to carry away with them in an entire season. One modern factory ship can take more whales in one season than the entire American whaling fl eet of 1846 which number over 700 vessels.” Lt (j.g.) Quentin R. Walsh, U.S.C.G., 1938

Fuzzy Neural-Network-Based Controller

Using a controller is necessary for any automation system. The controller must be cheap, reliable, user friendly and not cause any problems for inputs and outputs. Classical control systems like proportional integral derivative (PID) put adequate results of linear systems and continuous-time. In fact, real control systems are time-variant, with non-linearity and poorly calculated dynamic variables. For this reason, conventional control systems need an expert person to adjust controller parameters in general. Sometimes an operator is required to solve control problems. Human control is not completely reliable. Also, it does not include any electronic communication. In modern factories, every point must be monitored and electronically controlled from remote points when necessary. In this study, including every electronic communication channel, a simplified handling, low-cost, reliable, Fuzzy Neural Network Controller (FNNC) is designed.

Multi-objective Shop Floor Scheduling Using Monitored Energy Data

Modern factories will become more and more directly connected to intermittent energy sources like solar systems or wind turbines as part of a smart grid or a self-sufficient supply. However, solar systems or wind turbines are not able to provide a continuous energy supply over a certain time period. In order to enable an effective use of these intermittent energy sources without using temporary energy storages, it is necessary to rapidly and flexibly adapt the energy demand of the factory to the constantly changing requirements of the energy supply. The adaption of the energy demand to the intermittent supply results in different energy-related objectives for the production system of the factory, such as reducing energy consumption, avoiding power peaks, or achieving a power use within the available power supply. Shop Floor Scheduling can help to pursue these objectives within the production system. For this purpose, a solution methodology based on a meta-heuristic will be described for Flexible Job Shop Scheduling taking into account different energy- as well as productivity-related objectives.

Analysis of Chinese Welding Industries Today and in the Future (Focus on Cost, Productivity, and Quality)

This paper make a detailed survey and research about the real situation about Chinese welding industry, and the future cooperation suggestion between Finland and China in this area. This topic was approached by searching for the latest and most accurate information through interviews, site visits, websites, books and promotional materials. The site visits are the most important. The destination cities in China cover a large range from northern to the southwestern areas in China. More than 15 professional welding factories or factories which have a welding workshop were visited, and based on discussions and an investigation in those factories; detailed and reliable data was collected. By using and analyzing that information, a general profile of modern Chinese welding factories was generated.

Lesson of the month: extrinsic allergic (bronchiolo)alveolitis and metal working fluids

One of us was asked to consider a diagnosis of occupational asthma for a man who had worked for 20 years as a metal turner in a large, modern factory...

Towards a Theory of Counter-Modernity: Rethinking Zygmunt Bauman’s Holocaust Writings

This article defends the normative legitimacy of modernity from postmodern attempts to implicate modernity in oppressive social practices; Zygmunt Bauman’s Holocaust writings are an extreme example of such attempts. To discredit modernity Bauman renders the Holocaust a rational enterprise analogous to a modern factory system, dispassionately perpetrated by banal bureaucrats, such as Eichmann. Following Bauman, the identification of the Holocaust with modern mass production has become a standard trope of mainstream sociology, culminating in its identification with McDonald’s. However, this obscures the sadistic brutality of the Holocaust, the ideological zeal of perpetrators and the counter-modern norms that drove it. Although Bauman is widely considered a progressive thinker, his Holocaust writings bear the stamp of Heidegger’s regressive critique of modernity. A theory of counter-modernity not only provides a more accurate account of the Holocaust; it also restores the legitimacy of modern norms upon which a progressive critique of genocide rests.

‘Just-in-Time’ Disease

Disease and profits make for interesting bedfellows in modern factory farming, especially where poultry is concerned. Profitable, cheap factory-farmed chicken is dependent on large-scale, industrial throughput, yet those very same intensive conditions pose real risks for disease outbreaks. Campylobacter in poultry is now the main reported cause of food poisoning in the UK, responsible for more than 100 deaths a year. In this paper, drawing upon fieldwork from across the poultry supply chain, we argue that the intersection of just-in-time pressures, commercial and regulatory, with particular practices of biosecurity on farms and in processing factories, provides prime conditions for the amplification and spread of Campylobacter. We go on to argue that such ecologies of poultry production are best understood as part of a relational economy of disease, and that the very control exercised over the lives of farmed birds risks reversal into ever greater insecurity.

False Starts in the Birth of the Modern Factory in Australia : The Lithgow Small Arms Factory before the First World War

False Starts in the Birth of the Modern Factory in Australia : The Lithgow Small Arms Factory before the First World War

Sonda do kultury města - Zlín, modelové město modernity

In the 1920s and 1930s the Czech town of ZlĂ­n was shaped by a plan of the BaĹĽa shoe company to build a model company town exemplifying the perfect organisation of physical and social space (structuring society through the structure of space and vice versa), in which there is an order to everything and everyone has a distinct position within that order. This intention was tied to the needs of a society of mass production and was based on the standardisation and normalisation not only of production and industry facilities, but also of settlements and dwellings and even of the individual activities of people and their lives as a whole. In this society, the concentration of workers in larger factories and their subordination to precise division of labour entailed the imposition of disciplinary power over their bodies and the indoctrination of their minds with corporate ideology. All this, along with the surveillance and control of the people's lives, not just at work in the production plant but also in their homes, their schools, during their leisure time activities, and even through the overall urban layout itself, combined to give the town's inhabitants a specific collective identity. This is a story as much about the transformation of a small village community into a model town of modernity as it is about farmers, herders and craftspeople becoming modern factory workers and seeing their social field, habitus and identity changed. And it is even more the story of the function of urban space and and how its transformations usher in changes in the way of life.

Analysis of Resonance Transformer Design Based on Electronic Linear Accelerator

Resonance transformer design is a large-scale and complicated management process. With the improvement of science and technology in China, and the application of modern professional, factory, mechanical and information means provides sufficient science and technology basis for the transformer design level. Grounded in the environment of electronic linear accelerator, this thesis could change the current situation of imperfect transformer management. This thesis elaborates the background and significance of electronic linear accelerator in resonance transformer design, proposes the purpose and main content mode of resonance transformer design, gives a detailed introduction of the frame and functions of all modules of PSCAD simulation experiment, and finally makes relevant discussions of the application of resonance transformer.

The Iwakura Embassy and British Industrial Cities

The second volume of the Iwakura Reports is the writing on Britain. What is interesting, here, is the fact that the mission had visited the large factories in the major industrial cities. The editor of the reports in particular recorded the productive processes of goods at many factories, and wrote his own impressions of the landscapes of those cities. Those records let us know the real situation of the British economy at the time. Japanese historians admit that the activities of the Iwakura mission largely contributed to Japan's modernization. But there are few studies that analyzed the second volume of the reports which had mainly described modern factories and industrial cities. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the records of the reports on the British industry, and to examine what they recognized from the industrial civilization. The Iwakura Reports would furnish important information to the notables that had initiated the early industrialization in Japan. After the mission's visit, some British companies' export to Japan increased rapidly. What is more important, however, is that the British economy was losing its own vitality in the late Victorian age in which Japan began to be rapidly industrialized. During the Japanese industrialization, some Japanese diplomats and factory-owners might have realized the decline of the British industry. Britain began to be overtaken by her rival countries such as the United States and Germany. The Iwakura Reports do not let us know the change of the British manufacture in the late nineteenth century. Later, the leading figures of Japan's industrialization might focus on the rise of Germany or America. As the Iwakura mission had visited Britain in the early stage of the competition between Britain and other rival states, they could not know the real situation of the British economy. Furthermore, with compiling his manuscripts, the editor of the reports could not help being based upon the factory-owners' explanations and their brochures. This is the reason why he focused only on the excellence and competitiveness of British manufacture.

La odisea de los hermanos Tort y la Fábrica de Hilados y Tejidos La Providencia en Chiapas a finales del siglo XIX

Este artículo busca explicar el proceso de construcción de la Fábrica de Hilados y Tejidos de Algodón La Providencia emprendida por los hermanos Tort en Chiapas. Fue la fábrica más moderna construida en el estado a finales del siglo XIX, obra de un ideal modernizador que corresponde al pensamiento de la época y forma parte del contexto histórico del México que se configura entre las tres últimas décadas del siglo XIX y la primera del siglo XX, el cual se reproduce de manera particular en Chiapas.

ORHAN PAMUK'S RADICAL PROJECT TO VISUALIZE THE MAKING OF NOVELS

1 3 6 Y O R H A N PA M U K ’ S R A D I C A L P R O J E C T T O V I S U A L I Z E T H E M A K I N G O F N O V E L S A N I S S H I V A N I What is a museum? Why do we have museums? What do museums do? Can we get along without museums? Is there an alternative to museums? These questions have obsessed me for a long time. To believe in museums is to believe in a certain kind of modern cultural authority, to subject oneself to certain interpretive restrictions with respect to cultural value. A museum, we presume, is a collective endeavor, where objects of veneration have found their place because of consensus among authorities. But are museums really that innocent? There exists a cultural critique of museums as impartial aggregators of cultural value just as there is a critique of the literary canon. Who decides what belongs in a museum? Who arranges the objects within it, and to what purpose? The museum, like other modern institutional innovations, is a reflection of the urges embodied in the Enlightenment, where progress was inextricably tied up with notions of the state. The museum came into being along with the modern factory and school and prison. Although there T h e I n n o c e n c e o f O b j e c t s , b y O r h a n P a m u k ( A b r a m s , 2 7 2 p p . , $ 3 5 p a p e r ) 1 3 7 R were museums open to the public in antiquity and certainly in the Renaissance, the museum as we know it today emerged in the eighteenth century (the British Museum, 1753; the U≈zi, 1765; the Hermitage, 1764; the Louvre, 1793). As soon as democracy in its modern form began to be idealized, it also began to be sabotaged in the form of new means of obedience and regimentation. So if the museum reflects the optimistic side of the Enlightenment – the ‘‘naive’’ belief in popular education – it also reflects the dark side of the Enlightenment, to the extent that it assigns subordinate ranking to values deemed to have lost in the race to progress . If one visits a museum of Native American history in Virginia or New Mexico, what exactly is being presented? What about a museum in London containing images or objects pertaining to British rule in India? What would such a museum, with exactly the same artifacts, have meant in the eighteenth century as opposed to now? What about a similar museum in Delhi under the auspices of the Indian government? A museum is never innocent. It is consummately political, ideological, corrupted. It is interesting then that Orhan Pamuk’s new book is called The Innocence of Objects. Not the innocence of museums, but the innocence of objects, though the book is, among other things, an expansive, philosophical, meditative catalogue of the objects collected in the museum Pamuk worked so assiduously over the better part of a decade to assemble in connection with his novel The Museum of Innocence (published in Turkey in 2008). Imagine, a novelist creating a museum, from scratch, to exemplify the characters and events in his novel of tragic love in the authoritarian Turkey of the 1970s and 1980s, and to claim exemplary innocence for the project! Objects, we are to believe, can speak for themselves . If any novelist in contemporary times has enacted a more radical project on behalf of the innocence of writing, I don’t know of it. This is how Pamuk explains the origins of his unique venture: In its first version, The Museum of Innocence was to be a novel that resembled an encyclopedia – an ordered series of entries – about love and family with its narrative built around the Keskin family’s and Füsun’s belongings. From the mid-1990s, even while I was writing My Name Is Red, I had 1 3...

The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber by John Tully (review)

Reviewed by: The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber by John Tully James P. Kraft The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber. By John Tully. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011. 416 pp. $24.95 (cloth). Like oil and steel, rubber has been crucial to the rise of the modern world economy. Yet relatively few scholars have asked how businesses extracted and manufactured rubber, or considered how they exploited workers in the process of doing so. In this engaging and well-researched book, John Tully of Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia, explores these and related questions. Tully takes readers into swamps and jungles as well as modern factories and even Nazi extermination camps to flesh out a story of human greed and ruthlessness. His book helps readers understand what Karl Marx meant when he said that commodities enter the world “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” This book begins with a discussion of the nature and uses of rubber. Natural rubber comes from a milky fluid that protects plant life against herbivorous insects. The fluid can be extracted by “tapping” rubber-bearing trees and then processed into semisolid material, which rubber mills can then transform into marketable products. Natural rubber has extraordinary physical and chemical qualities. It is remarkably elastic and waterproof, for example, and highly resistant to corrosion. It can also be blended with a variety of other commodities, including textiles. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the world’s rubber supply came primarily from trees native to South America, Southeast Asia, and Central Africa. By the mid twentieth century, however, scientists had learned to make useful synthetic rubber by converting coal, limestone, and petroleum into chemical compounds. Roughly two-thirds of the rubber used in manufacturing is now synthetic. Few commodities have as many uses as rubber. Some products made with the substance have altered the course of history, such as pneumatic tires, underwater telegraph cables, and condoms. As Tully points out, modern transportation and communication systems have long relied on rubber, as have modern households and workplaces. Rubber has been indispensable to military operations. During World War II, it was used to make helmets, gas masks, inflatable boats and pontoons, aircraft wings, fuel tanks, boots, pup tents, mosquito nets, submarine parts, battleship decks, and even military pistols and rifles. Indeed, as the president of Goodyear Tire and Rubber said in 1939, rubber makes up the “flexing muscles and sinews” of modern society. One of the early chapters of this book traces the history of rubber production in the Amazon basin, an immense low-lying area once [End Page 998] filled with wild rubber trees. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the area yielded more than half the world’s natural rubber. “Rubber barons” from Brazil, Venezuela, and Peru controlled the region’s rubber trade, and employed thousands of poor peasants to work on their plantations at pitifully low wages under wretched conditions. Malaria, yellow fever, and other diseases killed many of these workers, and poisonous snakes, wild animals, and flesh-eating piranhas accounted for the deaths of many others. As the demand for rubber soared, rubber barons dragooned more and more peasants into the workforce. No laws or regulatory agencies kept them from mistreating workers. On some plantations, supervisors not only tortured or killed male laborers but also raped women and forced them into prostitution. The plight of rubber workers in Africa was equally disturbing, especially in areas of the Belgian Congo controlled by King Leopold, who leased out huge tracts of his country’s colony to private companies bent on collecting rubber. Company leaders and their minions, many of who were Africans, forced thousands of men and women into rubber-bearing districts where they worked for little or no pay. Overseers received bonuses according to the amount of latex workers collected, which brought out the worst in them. Whippings and more barbarous forms of punishment were commonplace. Resistance to such abuse was largely futile, though workers occasionally escaped from labor camps. The rise of the wild rubber trade had a catastrophic effect on the Congolese and their environment. In the mad search for...

Design and Analysis on Pneumatic System of 2RZ-J200 Air-Suction Precision Seeder

This paper described the importance of industrialized grow seedlings. In order to realize the modern factory forestry development request, precision seeder is the very key part of mechanized seedling production line. Based on the related work requirements of seedling production line, we have designed pneumatic system of precision seeder, analyzed the principle and selected suitable components of pneumatic device. This paper provides a theory basis for the further research.

Trade Unions: A Legal Succor to the Deprived Masses or a Travesty of Social Compulsions?

Trade Union is an outcome of the factory system. It is based on labor philosophy - “united we stand, divided we fall.” Trade union means a combination formed for the purpose of regulating the relations Unions Act 1926, however includes a combination formed for the purpose of regulating the relations not only between workmen and employers but also between workmen and workmen or between employers and employers. Industrial revolution in India has changed the traditional outlook in the labor management relationship. With the introduction of the modern factory system, personal relationship between employer and employee disappeared has given rise to many social and economic evils which made it imperative on the part of the workers to devise an effective mean to contact employees and to bargain with them. Trade unions are unique organizations whose role is variously interpreted and understood by different interest groups in the society.

INTEGRATING PATH PLANNING, ROUTING, AND SCHEDULING FOR LOGISTICS OPERATIONS IN MANUFACTURING FACILITIES

This article considers the following manufacturing/logistics problem: an autonomous vehicle (AV) is requested to serve a set of pickup and delivery (P/D) stations in the shop floor of a modern factory providing P/D tasks while moving safely (i.e., avoiding any collision with obstacles) in its environment. A two-sided time window associated with each P/D station brackets the service time to within a specified interval. A tour for AV is considered legal if it (a) is collision free, (b) passes through each P/D station exactly once, and (c) satisfies the service time restrictions imposed by the P/D stations. A legal tour always starts and ends at a depot. The problem is thereby dual NP-hard because it combines the characteristics of path planning and those of vehicle routing and scheduling problems. The objective is to determine the shortest possible legal tour for AV. A new method is introduced to solve the problem accomplished in two successive phases: first, AV's environment is mapped into a 2D B-spline surface embedded in 3D Euclidean space using a robust geometric model. Then, the generated surface is searched using a genetic algorithm for an optimum legal tour that satisfies the requirements of the vehicle's mission. The performance of the proposed method is investigated and discussed through characteristic simulated experiments.

Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880 by Isobel Armstrong (review)

Reviewed by: Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880 by Isobel Armstrong Elsie B. Michie (bio) Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880 by Isobel Armstrong; pp. 449. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. $71.83 cloth. Winner of the James Russell Lowell prize, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880 represents the capstone of Isobel Armstrong’s extraordinary career. In it, she brings her extensive knowledge of Victorian literature, particularly Victorian poetry, together with a vast amount of research on the various uses to which glass was put in the Victorian era. The result is a rich compendium of knowledge, a book that is as beautiful to look at as it is fascinating to read. The closest model for this work would be Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, except that Armstrong focuses not on multiple objects but on a single material. She argues that particular materials, glass in this case, might be thought of as characteristic of an era. Her book then asks what kind of social cross-section we would get if we were to examine a culture by looking at the uses and images that surround that material. What would such a study tell us about both the culture and the material? Armstrong’s book implicitly reverses the terms of the phrase “material culture” by exploring the culture of a material. Though Armstrong explicitly seeks to complicate approaches to objects or materials that emphasize “socio-political and economic meanings” (15), her book opens with a socio-economic and political focus. In the first section, she explores the making and breaking of glass by examining accounts of glass factories by such notable authors as Charles Dickens and Harriet Martineau, the history of the factory that provided the glass for the Crystal Palace (the Chance Factory), and the accounts of glass-makers’ trade union journals. Nestled somewhat uneasily in the midst of these accounts of production is a story of destruction that recounts the way that glass-breaking has been consistently used as a form of political protest. Throughout this section, Armstrong emphasizes that Victorian glass, like the historical period itself, “straddles awkwardly between modernity and history” (31). Though modern factory conditions had begun to be introduced, the Victorian trade unions still functioned much like medieval guilds. Though glass was being produced in large quantities, most of it was still blown by hand; “it was partly ‘petrified’ breath and partly frozen liquid, a breakable liquid” (4). As the beauty of this image suggests, Armstrong’s project involves more than the practical uses of glass. In it, she undertakes to set forth what she calls, following the work of Gaston Bachelard, the poetics of glass. As she notes in the introduction, materials function both usefully and “expressively. A buttress is both a symbol of and is force” (15). The middle section of Victorian Glassworlds reads glass both poetically and culturally. It begins and ends with considerations of glass’s symbolic functions. The opening chapter considers reflection in a myriad of locations, from the mirrored curtain of the Royal Coburg Theatre to the novels of Thomas Hardy and the paintings of Édouard Manet, Edward Burne-Jones, and James Tissot. The ending chapters deal with the Cinderella story and what Armstrong calls glassworld fictions: Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and [End Page 226] Dickens’s Bleak House. Between these chapters, Armstrong explores the visible manifestations of glass in Victorian culture, the plans for a glass arcade, the development of the conservatory, the popularity of cut glass, and, most prominently, the building of the Crystal Palace. What unites this section is its emphasis on windows, mirrors, and glass walls, its interest in the way glass “interposed an almost invisible layer of matter between the seer and the seen” (3). In the third and final section of Victorian Glassworlds, Armstrong explores the intermediary role glass plays when it functions as a lens; “with the lens not things, but images, were at issue” (253). Here, we move from the rich catalogue of Victorian objects that fills the book’s middle section, its largest, to the pleasures of looking through glass. Once again, as in her discussion of mirrors and windowpanes, Armstrong moves...